Introduction

This is a guide to help you make sustainable changes to your lifestyle and cultivate good habits. A healthy lifestyle consist of 3 components: lifestyle, diet and exercise.

Lifestyle

Why is lifestyle important?

Lifestyle factors such as occupation, time spent sedentary and choice of commute affects the non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) component of you total daily energy expenditure (TDEE). NEAT accounts for 6-10% of TDEE in individuals with a mainly sedentary lifestyle (e.g. Office workers) and for 50% or more in highly active subjects(e.g. Construction workers).[1]

Try to gradually increase your daily step count into the moderately active range. This can be done by taking the stairs once or twice a day, getting off a stop earlier or parking further away from the entrance. The idea is to build in more physical activity into your daily routine by doing what you can when you can, instead of building your routine around exercise. Refer to the “Activity Level” section for more information.

Diet

Why is diet important?

Unless you’re an elite athlete, you can’t out exercise a bad diet. Normal human beings do not have the time to spend the entire day exercising. It’s much easier to create a calorie deficit by modifying our diet.

The “Diet” section cover how many calories you should be consuming and suggestions on how to improve your diet.

The American Heart Association recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of intense exercise for overall cardiovascular health. Note that this is accumulative. You will still experience benefits even if you divide it into short 10-15 minutes sessions interspersed through the day.

In addition to that, aim for at least 1 session of strength training and 1 session of mobility and stretching per week. This is to help you improve your muscular strength and keep supple. Suggestions for these can be found in the “Resistance Exercise” and “Mobility and Pre-covery Routines” sections.

Exercise

Are you active or sedentary?

You can roughly gauge your activity level (eg. sedentary, light active etc) by the number of steps you take outside the gym.

Try downloading a free app like moves to track your activity/steps. You might also want to consider tracking calories for the first few weeks just to get a rough idea of your calorie intake and eyeball it from there. Myfitnesspal is awesome for this. You can just use the app and scan barcodes to get nutritional info.

Stretching & Warm-up

My favorite after work yoga routine 10 Rounds of sun salutations, followed by a couple rounds of the dancing warrior sequence and finishing with 5 rounds of moon salutations.
Videos of the sequences/flows:

Diet

Calories/Macros

These are min. recommendations, you can exceed them as long as you remain within your calorie allowance

Use 14-15kcal/lb of bodyweight to calculate maintenance.

For weight loss – 10-12kcal/lb

For weight gain – 15-18kcal/lb

1g of protein per lb of bodyweight

0.35g of fat per lb of bodyweight (~25% of total caloric intake)

Fill the rest of your calories with any amounts of fat/protein/carbs. I generally top up on carbs based on my recovery, eg. feeling sluggish, tired, worn out.

Notes:

Recent research has shown that higher protein intake leads to greater satiety. Plus if you are exercising (eg. running, weight lifting), the extra protein will help with recovery and strength building.

Maintain calories for 2 weeks and adjust accordingly.

Calculator – The values given by the calculator slightly underestimates the target calories, to give you more allowance to play with as you adjust to your new diet

[…] would be to go in with no expectations. Schedule an easy day (eg. Dan John’s tonic workouts, bodyweight movements, lower-weights or reps), and go into the gym just wanting to have fun, to enjoy the feeling of […]